Yes, that is my feeling about it, too - that morale or happiness would not be about population control.  Population control is better tied to a different set of of factors.  

But approval and morale do have the potential to be useful in deepening the game experience in a wide array of areas.  (And for that matter, morale and approval should be two separate things.  A population might really love their leader but are could still be low in morale).   These things could impact production (low morale means lower work rates).  It could impact wealth accumulation (if in concept, wealth is generated by taxes, the lower the approval... the more people become tax evaders!)  Approval could be affected by all sorts of things like war, peace, or whatever.

Anyway, I do hope it will be added in some way to create a new layer of depth.  *crosses fingers*

Same, it sounds very interesting :3

A moral/happiness system in some shape or form needs to happen. It doesn't need to be like in galciv2 where it restricts population growth but it certainly should have a large effect on the match itself.

Moral and Approval are currently not in the Alpha, there effect on the game has always been a bit fuzzy, and we want to make sure that if we bring it back, it is allot more clear what it dose. 

As mentioned above for the Alpha we mostly want war and growth, so hopefully Approval missing will not change the game to much.